Disclosure: We’re HoboHost, and this is our experience and opinion. Linked ratings and plan limits were checked October 1, 2026. Trustpilot says paid businesses receive no special treatment. We haven’t established that it sells category positions or that payment caused our disappearance.
Can you trust Trustpilot? That question hits differently when your business has a 4.9 rating, your customers are happy, and you suddenly disappear from the first page of results.
That’s what happened to HoboHost. We went from #7 to nowhere to be seen on the first page—overnight. The earlier list put the highest-rated hosting companies first, the way most people would expect a review site to work. Then we checked again, and HoboHost had disappeared from page one.
Our Trustpilot profile still showed 4.9 and 158 reviews. But people browsing the hosting category were being shown a very different lineup.
We think that’s a serious problem. A page headed “Best in Web Hosting Company” should help you understand which businesses customers rate highly. If the order measures something else, readers deserve a clear explanation.
📉 From #7 to nowhere on page one—with 4.9 stars
On October 1, the United States Web Hosting Company category used the label “Most relevant.” It started with SiteGround, Hostinger, IONOS, HostGator, and Bluehost. HoboHost wasn’t on the first page we checked.
Here are three businesses that were:
- Hostinger: 4.6, with 72,734 reviews
- Namecheap: 4.2, with 21,973 reviews
- tsoHost: 3.2, with 15,540 reviews
⭐ Meanwhile, HoboHost had 4.9, with 158 reviews.
Put yourself in a customer’s shoes. You open a page about the best hosting companies. You naturally expect customer ratings to carry real weight. Instead, a company with 3.2 stars makes the first page while a smaller company with 4.9 doesn’t.
What is the customer supposed to take away from that?
🔎 How does Trustpilot rank companies now?
“Most relevant” is doing a lot of work here. Relevant to someone looking for good support? Relevant to someone comparing prices? Or relevant because a business has tens of thousands of reviews?
The current order plainly isn’t highest rating first. The examples above make that easy to see. To us, the list appears to give larger review histories more prominence than the star score alone would suggest.
A larger review history can be useful. We understand why someone would want to consider it. But there’s a big difference between showing people more information and presenting an unclear ordering under a “Best in” heading.
In our view, this makes the category page a poor guide to customer satisfaction. A smaller business can earn excellent feedback and still become much harder to find.
💰 Does Trustpilot favor paying businesses?
This is where the money question comes in.
Trustpilot sells plans that let businesses send more review invitations. Its official pricing page lists these monthly allowances:
- Free: 50 invitations
- Starter: 100 invitations
- Plus: 300 invitations
- Premium: 1,000 invitations
- Enterprise: unlimited invitations
Free accounts that use up their allowance must wait for the next month or upgrade. Customers can still leave reviews themselves; the limit applies to invitations sent through these tools.
In plain terms: paying buys more opportunities to ask customers for reviews.
If review volume helps a business get seen, that extra capacity can matter. A business paying for 1,000 invitations has far more chances to request feedback than one limited to 50. Even with the same customer satisfaction, their review totals could grow very differently.
That’s why, to us, the system appears tilted toward businesses that can afford more review collection. Whether Trustpilot intends that outcome or not, it’s a fair concern for a smaller company watching lower-rated, high-volume businesses take the visible spots.
⚖️ Does “no special treatment” mean fair rankings?
In its business-model explanation, Trustpilot says the same rules apply to free and paid businesses. It also says subscriptions provide extra tools for collecting feedback and using reviews in marketing.
But applying the same rules doesn’t necessarily mean everyone has the same opportunity to be seen.
Think of two businesses with equally happy customers. One can ask 50 customers for reviews each month through the platform. The other can ask 1,000. If collecting more reviews helps with visibility, the second business has an advantage built into its plan.
That is the issue we want Trustpilot to address. How much does review volume affect category placement? And how does the platform account for the fact that it charges businesses for greater collection capacity?
“Most relevant” isn’t much of an answer.
💬 Are Trustpilot reviews reliable?
Individual reviews can still be useful. Read what customers actually say, especially about problems you care about. For hosting, that might mean support, downtime, moving a website, unexpected charges, or renewal prices.
Read recent positive and negative feedback. Look at how the business responds when something goes wrong. Then compare those experiences with its actual terms and prices.
Our guide to hosting companies with transparent renewal pricing covers another question worth asking before signing up: what will this service cost after the introductory deal ends?
A company’s place in a category list should never replace that work. Being easy to find isn’t the same as being the best choice for you.
📣 Is Trustpilot trustworthy? Readers deserve answers
Our frustration is simple. Customers gave us excellent feedback. We were #7 among highly rated hosts. Then the first page changed, and we were nowhere to be seen on it while lower-rated businesses remained.
We want Trustpilot to explain the ordering in terms an ordinary person can understand. Tell readers what makes one company “more relevant” than another. Explain how ratings and review totals affect the list. Make it easy to compare businesses by customer score.
If paid collection tools can help businesses build the signals that earn visibility, explain that too.
Can you trust Trustpilot? You can use its reviews to learn about customer experiences. After what we’ve seen, we would be much more cautious about treating its default category order as a list of the best businesses.
Our customers’ feedback still matters to us. You can read HoboHost’s reviews directly and compare our hosting services for yourself. A change in where we appear on a review site doesn’t change the service we owe our customers.
